The Dying Hours Read online

  Thorne said his goodbyes, but he was not going home just yet.

  He walked back inside, past his office and straight on until he came out by the stairwell behind the station’s front desk. He hung his ID around his neck then climbed two flights to the second floor. He skirted the CID offices, interview rooms and forensic suites, and eventually found himself standing at the entrance to the bridge.

  Lewisham station, reputedly the biggest in Europe, was composed of two entirely separate four-storey blocks linked by a covered walkway, thirty feet long and walled in glass. The block in which Thorne worked housed the Borough departments: CID and Uniform, Mounted Unit, Dogs. The other building was home to some of the more specialist squads: Firearms, Serious and Organised Crime and a Murder Investigation Team (MIT) that was the largest in south-east London.

  In the three months Thorne had worked as a uniformed inspector at Lewisham station, he had never crossed the bridge.

  He hesitated for a second or two, then began to walk across. He kept his head down as people passed him in both directions, angry with himself for feeling jittery, as though he were back at school and creeping nervously towards the headmaster’s office. He felt a little better by the time he reached the other side. When he remembered that Treasure called it the ‘Wanker’s Walkway’.

  The smell was different in this block. Or perhaps it was just the absence of those distinctive smells he had become accustomed to in recent months; in the locker room and the custody area. There was carpet rather than painted cement or peeling floor tiles and there was a good deal of polished, blond wood. There was space.

  Thorne pushed at the door to the MIT major incident room, but it would not open. He stepped back and noticed the entry panel; its ten shiny, numbered buttons. He tensed and swore under his breath. There was nowhere in his own building to which he could not gain entry by swiping his ID, but it was clear that access to the hallowed territory of the Murder Investigation Team was only granted to the privileged few who knew the code.

  Privileged did not always mean bright, however. Thorne pressed 1-2-3-4 and pushed again. This time he swore loudly enough to turn the heads of two women chatting further along the corridor.

  He knocked on the door.

  Through the small window in the door, he watched the man at the desk only a few feet away look up, stare blankly at him for a few seconds, then turn back to his computer. A woman on the phone at an adjacent desk spared him no more than a glance.

  He knocked again, a good deal harder, and leaned closer to the glass to make sure that anyone who could be bothered got a good look at his expression. Finally, the man at the computer dragged his backside out of his chair. He walked across to the door as though furious at the absence of a butler to do it for him.

  ‘I want to speak to the DCI,’ Thorne said. He lifted up his ID, held it nice and close.

  The officer studied it for a lot longer than was necessary. He said, ‘What do you want him for?’

  Was there a hint of a smirk?

  ‘What’s your name?’ Thorne asked.

  The officer told him and though Thorne had forgotten the name almost as soon as he’d heard it, he’d got all the information he needed. He knew the man’s rank. Thorne took a second, then walked slowly across until his face was no more than six inches away from the detective sergeant’s. He smiled and whispered, ‘“What do you want him for… sir?”’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You heard,’ Thorne said. ‘Now, I couldn’t give a toss about your flashy suit, because even though I don’t wear one of those any more I’ve still got a nice white shirt with two shiny pips on the shoulder. Now, last time I checked, an inspector was still one notch above a sergeant. Don’t tell me that’s changed as well, since my day.’

  ‘No,’ the sergeant said, confused.

  Thorne waited.

  ‘No, sir.’

  The man was clearly not intimidated, the word spoken with as little colour as possible, imbued with the same level of respect he might have for a pimp or a paedophile. Thorne recognised the tone. It was one he’d used often enough himself; carpeted by some bumptious chief superintendent or desperate to twist the arm of an over-cautious DCI. But he was not going to accept it from a tosser like this. Not now; not simply because the tosser was the ’tec and Thorne was the one with the uniform in his locker.

  The Woody.

  ‘Well, I’m glad we’ve got that sorted, Sergeant,’ Thorne said. ‘Cleared the air a bit. Now piss off and fetch your guv’nor, there’s a good lad.’

  It was not yet eight o’clock in the morning, but the place was already buzzing. Fifteen, twenty officers moving quickly between desks, conferring with colleagues or working alone at screens and on phones. Thorne watched and listened; the noises, the focus of it all, painfully familiar to him. He turned and studied the whiteboard that ran the length of one wall: the photographs of suspects, witnesses, victims. The all-important names and dates scribbled in felt pen: closed cases in red, open in green. Thorne had spent so many years in rooms like this, tapping into the same kind of energy, feeding off it. Standing where he was now, as it hummed and crackled around him, he was dry-mouthed suddenly and disoriented. He was slightly dizzy.

  He felt like a man on the wagon, with a beer in his hand.

  After a couple of minutes, a man appeared at the far end of the room and waved Thorne across. He greeted Thorne by name and introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Neil Hackett. Thorne followed him into a large and tidy office, took the chair that was offered and glanced out across Lewisham High Street.

  The view across the DCI’s desk was not an awful lot prettier. Hackett was at least six-four, but his height was not enough to disguise the extra weight he was carrying and when he undid his jacket, the gut that spilled out threatened to burst the buttons on his expensive shirt.

  ‘Let me guess then, Tom.’ Hackett let out a sigh as he sat down and the chair did much the same. ‘This is in relation to your double suicide Thursday night.’

  Thorne took a couple of seconds. Said, ‘Right.’ Clearly, the jungle drums were even louder, or just being beaten more furiously, than he’d suspected. He was certain now that he’d done the right thing in asking Phil Hendricks to look at the Coopers’ PM reports.

  Hackett smiled, as though Thorne’s train of thought was blindingly obvious and he was paying him the courtesy of an explanation. ‘Paul Binns is a mate of mine.’

  ‘That’s nice for you,’ Thorne said.

  ‘He’s a good officer.’

  ‘I never said he wasn’t.’

  ‘Good. Besides, Paul isn’t one of mine, so no point coming crying to me with some sort of complaint.’

  ‘Nobody’s crying to anyone.’

  ‘Even better,’ Hackett said.

  ‘I just think that someone might want to take another look at it,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Someone like me?’

  ‘It can’t hurt, can it?’

  Hackett sat back and reached to pat down sandy-coloured hair that was swept back from a widow’s peak. Fat-faced as he was, his head still appeared small by comparison with the rest of him. ‘I might be missing something here, but haven’t you already signed off on this?’

  ‘I didn’t have a lot of choice,’ Thorne said.

  ‘But you’re not happy.’

  Thorne paused, wanting to choose his words carefully. ‘I didn’t get the impression that it was being taken seriously.’ That I was being taken seriously.

  ‘This would be the insulin bottle without a label,’ Hackett said. ‘And the fact that the old lady took her teeth out.’

  ‘Sir,’ Thorne said. That, and something else. A part of the picture that did not make sense, but which stubbornly refused to dislodge itself from the silt in Thorne’s mind and bob to the surface. ‘Look, I know it sounds a bit… thin.’

  ‘Thin? It’s bloody anorexic.’ Hackett shook his head. ‘You do know that the old man was a retired doctor, don’t you? I
mean, there’s your insulin mystery solved.’

  ‘No,’ Thorne said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  Hackett leaned forward. ‘Listen, if I’d been there, I would have done exactly the same as DI Binns and I wouldn’t have been nearly as reasonable about it. It’s not like we haven’t got enough genuine murders on the books right this minute.’

  ‘It didn’t feel right,’ Thorne said.

  Hackett laughed. ‘Oh Christ, are you talking about a “hunch”?’

  ‘No, sir—’

  ‘I’ve heard all sorts about you, mate, but nobody ever said you were one of those idiots.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Thorne said. Simple, measured. The truth.

  ‘So what, then?’ Hackett had stopped laughing. His face darkened and he suddenly looked in the mood for a scrap. ‘What does “right” mean, exactly, Inspector? Right, like the shit you pulled a few months back? Right, like forcing a civilian into the middle of an armed siege?’

  Thorne felt the blood move fast to his face. The case with Helen. When everything had fallen apart.

  ‘Oh, I know all about it,’ Hackett said. ‘I know that you messed up big time and that you cut one or two other corners that we won’t bother bringing up now, and that’s why you got bumped off the Murder Squad. It’s why you’re working downstairs on the other side of that bridge and hating every bloody minute of it.’ He leaned forward. ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’

  ‘I’m hating every minute of this,’ Thorne said.

  Hackett smiled. ‘I know you’re hating it, because I know damn well that I’d hate it too. So, it strikes me you’ve only got two options.’

  ‘I’m guessing you’re going to tell me what they are.’

  The DCI pointed a fat pink finger. ‘You’re the one taking up my time, remember. So, stop being a smartarse and listen. You can get out. Nice and simple… chuck it in and open a pub, get yourself a hobby, whatever. Or, you can suck it up and do your job. Your choice. If you decide to stay on, you can start by remembering that when somebody kills themselves it’s not actually a murder, OK? You can stop playing detective.’

  Thorne stood up and said, ‘Thanks for your time.’

  Walking out through the incident room, he returned the stare of the man who had opened the door, but Thorne looked away first.

  He stopped halfway back across the bridge. He pressed his hands and then his head against the glass.

  Two options.

  SIX

  ‘He made me feel like such a twat,’ Thorne said. He smacked his palm against the fridge door, then turned to Helen who was sitting at the kitchen table, feeding Alfie his lunch. When she looked up at him, Thorne recognised the expression. ‘OK, like even more of a twat.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘I know,’ Thorne said. ‘It was stupid.’ He traipsed across and dropped into the seat opposite her. At the end of the table, Alfie was spitting out more than he was eating and happily smearing orange mush across the plastic tray of his high chair. ‘Really… stupid.’

  ‘Yeah, well it’s easy with hindsight, isn’t it?’ Helen leaned across to scoop a spoonful of orange mush – carrot? Sweet potato? – back into Alfie’s mouth. ‘So, there’s no need to beat yourself up about it.’

  Thorne said, ‘Yeah, I know,’ thinking: Since when did ‘need’ have anything to do with it. Of course, in hindsight, he should probably have thought things through a little more before marching across that bridge and trying to tell someone like Hackett what he should be doing. Not that any amount of thinking would have made too much difference in the end. Because Thorne had known from the moment Christine Treasure had told him to let it go, that he could not.

  ‘Come on, let’s get you sorted out.’

  Thorne had been staring down at the table and looked up, but he saw that Helen was talking to her son. He passed her a few feet of kitchen towel from the roll on the table and watched as she cleaned Alfie’s face and wiped away the mess on his chair. Thorne moved to stand up.

  ‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  Thorne nodded, grateful, and sat back down. He had not got to bed until just before nine and had barely managed four hours’ sleep before waking and finding himself unable to get off again; trudging into the kitchen like a zombie in pyjama bottoms and a Hank Williams T-shirt.

  ‘One thing you might want to ask yourself though,’ Helen said. She put the dishes into the sink and tossed the dirty bib on to the worktop.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well… going in there like that, stirring things up—’

  ‘I wasn’t stirring anything up.’

  ‘OK.’ She smiled. ‘Whatever you call it.’ She walked back to the table and lifted Alfie out of the high chair. ‘Was it because you honestly still believe there was something iffy about that suicide the other night? Or was it really just because you were pissed off at being ignored?’

  Thorne shook his head.

  ‘Tom…⁠?’

  He had told Helen some of what Hackett had said to him. The lecture about making choices, the gleefully sarcastic comments about what had happened in that newsagent’s five months before. He hadn’t bothered to pass on Hackett’s final words of wisdom.

  The line that had stung more than anything else.

  Stop playing detective.

  ‘Look, it would be perfectly understandable.’

  ‘Understandable or not,’ Thorne said, ‘that isn’t what’s going on.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at her. ‘I’m sure about that.’

  ‘Juice,’ Alfie said. ‘Juice.’

  Thorne watched Helen put Alfie down and walk across to the fridge. ‘Is that what you really think?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m just saying you need to ask yourself that question, that’s all.’ She reached into the fridge, her back to him. ‘Look, I’m not saying I blame you.’

  Thorne pushed his chair back hard. ‘Oh, good.’ He stood up. ‘And yes, I still think it’s bloody iffy, OK?’

  Helen turned, shaking the small carton of juice in her hand. She was still smiling, but suddenly her voice had a little less colour in it. ‘Maybe you should go back to bed. I’m taking Alfie down to the playgroup, so we won’t disturb you. With any luck you’ll get up in a better mood.’

  Thorne was already on his way.

  He waited until he heard Helen go out, then sat up and propped a pillow behind his head. He had made a note of all the numbers he thought he might need before leaving the station. Now, he unfolded the piece of paper on which he’d scribbled everything down, set his open laptop on the bed next to him and reached for his phone.

  As offices went, this was certainly the cosiest Thorne had ever worked in.

  Assuming that the deaths of John and Margaret Cooper were not the suicides they appeared to be – and whatever had told Thorne that was the case still refused to make itself known to him – it was safe to say that their two children were not serious suspects. Both were in their fifties, with children of their own. The son, Andrew, had been in Edinburgh at the time of his parents’ deaths and his sister, Paula, lived in Leicester. Both were now staying at a hotel in London while making the funeral arrangements, and when Thorne called Andrew Cooper’s mobile he was able to speak to each of them in turn.

  He passed on his sympathies and assured them that having spoken to the pathologist, their parents would not have suffered. That it would have been over quickly. Each of them told him how shocked they were. Stunned, they both said. Their parents had both been in relatively good health, had seemed well and happy, and nobody in the family would ever have expected something like this.

  ‘The last thing…’

  The more Thorne heard, the more certain he became and the less bothered by his own subterfuge; the fact that he was not calling them for altogether benign reasons.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot on your plate,’ he said to Paula.
‘But have you managed to talk to everybody that needs to be informed? I mean, it’s probably the last thing you want to think about, but presuming there was a will… I just wondered if you’d spoken to your parents’ solicitor?’

  It was the last thing either of them was thinking about, she told him and when Thorne offered to do it for them, she said there was really no need. She said she did not know this was the sort of thing the police did for bereaved families. ‘It’s not going to be complicated anyway,’ she said. ‘It’s only me and Andrew and it’s not like it’s a fortune or anything.’

  Thorne felt no more than a twinge of guilt when she thanked him for calling.

  ‘We just have no idea why,’ she said, before she hung up.

  Paula had been talking about why her parents would have wanted to take their own lives, but lying there, studying the pattern of cracks on the bedroom ceiling, Thorne was equally lost when it came to why anyone would want to murder them and make it appear that way.

  It was certainly not about money. It was not a burglary gone wrong and it was not done in a hurry, or in a rage.

  The bedroom was tidy.

  Nothing had been disturbed.

  So what was wrong with the picture?

  The last thing – always the last thing – to be considered was that there simply was no clear motive of any sort; nothing that Thorne had come across before, at any rate. Margaret and John Cooper might have died for no other reason than that specific to the individual who had killed them. If this was the case – and more than anything, Thorne hoped that it was not – then another possibility would need to be considered that was altogether more disturbing.

  That whoever killed them had done so simply because it was enjoyable.

  Thorne looked up another number and dialled.

  ‘It’s Tom,’ he said, when the call was answered. When the woman at the other end of the phone did not respond immediately, he added, ‘Thorne,’ then said, ‘Are you busy?’